High jinks ’n’ politics. Whee!
A mildly hypochondriac but sweet young senatorial aide takes everything mean old Washington can throw at her while giving her all to a possible national program to lower prescription costs for senior citizens.
Vice-presidential daughter and first-time novelist Gore can be presumed to know the lay of the land. Here, the eponymous Sammy (née Samantha) Joyce, daffy in a sorority-cutup sort of way, has cast her lot with virtuous Ohio junior Senator Robert Gary, slightly grizzled, right (that is to say, left)-thinking father of two-year-old twins. Domestic policy advisor Sammy shares a flat with a succession of Japanese fighting fish and puts in 80-hour weeks trying to wrest this great nation’s prescription drug policy from the grip of the pharmaceutical companies and put it in the compassionate hands of her straight-arrow boss. She’s busy as a bee, but finds enough time in between vital hearings and the preparation of position papers to carry on a passionate fling with devilishly handsome Aaron Driver, principal speechwriter for evilly cynical New Jersey senator and presidential hopeful John Bramer. Sammy and Aaron have become bedfellows thanks to an alliance on health matters between their bosses, which sends Sammy to lend her encyclopedic knowledge of health issues to the crafting of a landmark prescription drug bill. But, oh! What's this? The Bramer team has gutted everything important from Sammy’s draft, and Senator Gary is going to go along with it! It’s a painful lesson in political compromise, and there is further pain to come. Aaron is an awfully hard partier, and there are unpleasant, unexplained gaps in his schedule. Sammy’s best friend Liza thinks he's a rat. Many, many e-mails fly (BlackBerry gets fabulous product placement), and several more fighting fish die as political and romantic alliances form and re-form. Gore goes for a zany but sweet tone while protecting her dad’s, and maybe even her own, political viability with lots of discreet veiling.
High jinks ’n’ politics. Whee!Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-5219-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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